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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What did DuBois believe in that Richard Wright did not believe in according to Gilroy?
(a) Social perfection.
(b) Pan-Africanism.
(c) Returning to black roots.
(d) Essential blackness.

2. The second mode of double consciousness portrays blacks as what?
(a) Homeless.
(b) Wandering for a time.
(c) A prophecy of a homeland.
(d) A home unto himself.

3. What does Gilroy say was a formative influence on black culture in Richard Wright's works?
(a) Capitalism.
(b) Individualism.
(c) Self-reliance.
(d) Common privation.

4. What does The Souls of Black Folk say to white people according to Gilroy?
(a) It challenges their sense of color-coded civilization.
(b) It establishes the intellectual credentials of the black races.
(c) It affirms the interrelationship between slavers and slaves.
(d) It proposes that helping the blacks return to Africa is the best path for progress.

5. Where does Gilroy say Richard Wright's profundity came from?
(a) His region.
(b) His personal experience.
(c) His access to African-American vernacular.
(d) His family.

6. When was the journal 'Presence Africaine' published?
(a) 1972.
(b) 1947.
(c) 1964.
(d) 1958.

7. What does Gilroy say Richard Wright was criticized for?
(a) Failing to write about specifically American concerns.
(b) Writing misogynistic male characters.
(c) Hatred of women.
(d) Writing men and women who are victims of the capitalist system.

8. How does Gilroy turn away from Richard Wright at the end of The Black Atlantic?
(a) He proposes that art is a solution to tension between races.
(b) He calls for a new pan-Africanism.
(c) He accepts that black experiences can resonate with non-blacks.
(d) He asks for a specifically American black culture.

9. How does Gilroy say blacks are different from Jews?
(a) Blacks do not have a homeland to return to.
(b) Blacks were never systematically exterminated.
(c) Blacks do not believe they all come from a common ancestor.
(d) Blacks do not believe that they have a covenant with their god.

10. What does Gilroy say we should accept as inescapable?
(a) Traditions.
(b) Hybridity.
(c) History.
(d) Essentialism.

11. What theory culminated in the Holocaust?
(a) Messianic theology.
(b) Evolution.
(c) Egalitarianism.
(d) Eugenics.

12. How did DuBois' birthplace affect his identity?
(a) He felt genuinely black because he was born in Africa.
(b) He felt aloof from American race politics because he was born in England.
(c) He felt inauthentically black because he was not born in the south.
(d) He felt like a spokesman for his race because he was born among them in the south.

13. What conflict was taking up too much space in the discussion of race in American literature according to Richard Wright?
(a) The conflict between man and technology.
(b) The conflict between young and old.
(c) The conflict between men and women.
(d) The conflict between owners and workers.

14. What is the last period of black history, according to DuBois, in The Souls of Black Folk?
(a) Political autonomy.
(b) Black music.
(c) Returning to Africa.
(d) Black self-reliance.

15. What primary experience shaped violence in the black community according to Gilroy?
(a) Capitalist exploitation.
(b) Modern marriage.
(c) Factory production.
(d) Slavery.

Short Answer Questions

1. Where does black culture draw its vocabulary of exile according to Gilroy?

2. What distinction does Gilroy say Richard Wright was the first black writer to achieve?

3. What ontological state does Gilroy say is the heart of many stories in black culture?

4. What does Gilroy say about racial traditions?

5. What does music allow black culture to do with this feeling?

(see the answer keys)

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